milk color, and slightly bald; in manner cool
and collected, and more frank in his answers than any other chief I ever
met. He was the greatest warrior ever heard of beyond the colony; for,
unlike Mosilikatse, Dingaan, and others, he always led his men
into battle himself. When he saw the enemy, he felt the edge of his
battle-axe, and said, "Aha! it is sharp, and whoever turns his back on
the enemy will feel its edge." So fleet of foot was he, that all his
people knew there was no escape for the coward, as any such would be
cut down without mercy. In some instances of skulking he allowed the
individual to return home; then calling him, he would say, "Ah! you
prefer dying at home to dying in the field, do you? You shall have your
desire." This was the signal for his immediate execution.

He came from the country near the sources of the Likwa and Namagari
rivers in the south, so we met him eight hundred or nine hundred miles
from his birth-place. He was not the son of a chief, though related
closely to the reigning family of the Basutu; and when, in an attack by
Sikonyele, the tribe was driven out of one part, Sebituane was one in
that immense horde of savages driven back by the Griquas from Kuruman in
1824.* He then fled to the north with an insignificant party of men and
cattle. At Melita the Bangwaketse collected the Bakwains, Bakatla, and
Bahurutse, to "eat them up". Placing his men in front, and the women
behind the cattle, he routed the whole of his enemies at one blow.
Having thus conquered Makabe, the chief of the Bangwaketse, he took
immediate possession of his town and all his goods.

* See an account of this affair in Moffat's "Missionary
Enterprise in Africa".

Sebituane subsequently settled at the place called Litubaruba, where
Sechele now dwells, and his people suffered severely in one of those
unrecorded attacks by white men, in which murder is committed and
materials laid up in the conscience for a future judgment.

A great variety of fortune followed him in the northern part of the
Bechuana country; twice he lost all his cattle by the attacks of the
Matabele, but always kept his people together, and retook more than he
lost. He then crossed the Desert by nearly the same path that we did.
He had captured a guide, and, as it was necessary to travel by night in
order to reach water, the guide took advantage of this and gave him the
slip. After marching till morning, and going as they thought right,